An image that has accompanied the iPhone for many years, namely claims that it is a particularly secure option and that it offers a very high level of privacy protection He will leave, alas, thin like tears in the rain, as Roy Batty would say. And it may seem like an accessory detail, but it’s not at all, to the point that Apple has stuck out its chest on many occasions over the years, boasting that it’s the most secure option and the one that best protects user privacy. ..

Just yesterday, when I was talking about the now very near sideloading of apps on iOS, I remembered Some of the latest and most popular iPhone security issues, such as the one affecting AirDrop and the one affecting VPNs, two issues that Apple was aware of long before they were made public, and that, at least in the case of AirDrop, there is evidence that it was being actively exploited. Apple should focus on these types of issues and not let them persist for years.

Among the recently discovered issues, you may remember that we told you about them in October of last year the one that affected not only iOS but also macOSand this caused the MAC address hiding feature of network adapters to not work properly. This bug was identified and exposed by Mysk Inc., which was able to detect the MAC address of an Apple device connected to a local network simply by analyzing network traffic with Wireshark.

Well, Myxk Inc. re-identified the problem and found it some iPhone apps collect and send information when notifications are displayed. Yes, you read that right, the mere fact that your device displays a notification and/or interacts with it will result in a series of data being sent to the servers of the company responsible for it. And if you’re thinking about it, no, we’re not talking about unknown apps, but some as hugely popular as Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter.

And what type of information do these apps send? Well, in principle “harmless” data, such as the time zone in which the user is located, the amount of free memory on the device, the time elapsed since the last reboot… in short, data that can be considered irrelevant, but that, in fact, combined and accumulated can lead to the creation of a fingerprint which can be used to identify a specific user and provide him with personalized content (especially advertising).

Consulted by Gizmodo, Meta and Microsoft realized that notifications from their iPhone apps were actually sending that information to their servers, but claims they do so solely to improve their own choice of what to notify users. However, and even more so considering that this is something that is unknown to the average user, Apple should immediately implement a policy to prevent the companies responsible from continuing this behavior.